Individuals often receive solicitations for donations from fundraising entities. Such solicitations may be printed solicitations received in the mail. Printed solicitations may also be handed to the individual by a representative or agent of a fundraising entity, such as when the individual is traveling. Other solicitations may be received as emails sent to the individual. Often times these solicitations for donations are designed to look like a legitimate request for funds from a known entity. In some cases, although the solicitation may look legitimate, the entity or organization requesting funds may not actually exist. Other solicitations may be requests for personal information of the individual. For example, a letter or email may purport to be from the IRS, requesting taxpayer information such as the individual's social security number and/or other personal information. Often times such solicitations are fraudulent and are not actually from the entity or organization listed in the solicitation, or are from a non-existent entity. Some fraudulent solicitations are easy to detect and reject based on the text in the solicitation, but others may not be so apparent. Solicitations may include logos of the entity, and fraudulent logos in a solicitation may be similar to the actual logo and not easily recognized.
Such fraudulent solicitations are often targeted to the elderly, and this target group may be less likely to be able to detect when a solicitation or request is fraudulent. The elderly may be less familiar with the logos of entities and the types of fraudulent solicitations that are often sent out.